As Lost Ends, Creators Explain How They Did It, What’s Going On

After six seasons of riveting weirdness — smoke monsters! wormholes! tropical polar bears! — Lost is coming to a close.

In 2004, ABC called on producer J.J. Abrams to create a prime-time drama that capitalized on the success of Survivor: something tropical, Cast Away-ish, and closer to Lord of the Flies than Gilligan’s Island. Oh, they asked, and could you make it a towering, mainstream megahit, please? What executives got from the guy best known for a brainy college soap (Felicity) and an even brainier spy soap (Alias) was Lost, a fiendishly obscure, cast-of-thousands epic about … well … to say it’s about people on a magic island is selling it short. To say it’s about Everything — which its adherents swear it is — is a bit grandiose. So let’s just say it’s about destiny. And metaphysics. And quantum physics. And leadership, torture, time travel, synchronicity, Skinner boxes, geodesic domes, polar bears, doomsday equations, comic books, the Casimir effect, and the no-less-potent Cass Elliot effect. It was weird. Even weirder: It was a hit. A towering, mainstream megahit. You’d think a show like this could happen only in some alternate television universe. Maybe so. Maybe for the past six years we’ve been living in that universe. That would be so Lost.

The series endured thanks to the power of faith (coincidentally, a theme of the show) and a more modern expression of devotion — fandom. More to the point, faith in fandom: Lost‘s producers never stopped trusting their viewers’ intelligence. Pressed for answers (which, let’s be frank, they probably didn’t have), the high priests of Lost instead delivered deeper mysteries. Queried about the flashbacks, they responded by flashing forward and even sideways into a parallel world. They sowed the Web with the show’s sprawling mythology. They borrowed liberally and respectfully from science fiction and comic books. They understood that Lost, like God, would live in the cloud, kept alive by the theorizing and communing of its acolytes.

When Lost leaves the airwaves on May 23, its creators have pledged never to speak of it again. It’s for the best. That’s why we’re stopping time here and making that fidgety, spatiotemporally promiscuous island sit still long enough for us to plumb and pay tribute to its mysteries. Once more into the hatch!

— Scott Brown

The Cargo

Lost begins as Oceanic Airlines flight 815 from Sydney to Los Angeles breaks up over the Pacific. Here is what’s recovered from that Boeing 777-300ER.— Nick Veronin

324

passengers

1

yellow Labrador retriever

1

dog leash

1

Plane manifest

1

life raft

electrical wire

1

fire extinguisher

1

transceiver

1

screwdriveR

1

roll of electrical tape

3

Electronic components

1

circuit board

2

metal basins

1

beverage cart

1

Metal bowl

4

rolls of toilet paper

20

Seat cushions

3

blankets

1

Pillow

1

Pair of Scissors

Plastic tubing

10

Tarps

6

flashlights

1

compass

2

Nets

2

rolls of medical tape

2

Zippo lighters

4

Bic lighters

3

yards of Twine

6

4 x 4-inch squares of gauze

10

Ace bandages

30

yards of Rope

1

ax

1

pair of handcuffs

3

bottle rockets

5

Guns

2

Boxes of ammunition

11

backpacks

1

Fanny pack

1

laptop

2

Toiletry kits

1

sewing kit

1

tube of sunblock

1

Straight razor

1

Wheelchair

2

bottles of antacid

1

bottle of isopropyl alcohol

The Island Paradox

How will the series end? What do the numbers mean? And what’s the deal with Libby? Lost executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof aren’t telling. They were, however, happy to sit down with theoretical physicist (and Lost fan) Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here, to talk time travel and the universe — and to reveal the link between Lost and Chuck E. Cheese.

Sean Carroll: You’ve used every type of time travel in your narrative — flashback, flash forward, flash sideways. You now have two timelines: life after the hydrogen bomb is detonated and life as if the plane had never crashed. Will season six end up making sense of how these two timelines fit together?

Damon Lindelof: That, to us, is the only answer we owe. Right now, the characters are not aware that there’s any timeline other than the one they are in. But if they were to become aware of the parallel worlds, what might they do about it? That becomes a fundamental question.

Carroll: I always say that without physics, there’s no drama. Because there are rules. I think scientists don’t always understand that in a science fiction context the rules may not be the rules of our world, but there are still rules.

Carlton Cuse: As we draw into the final season, the mystical quotient rises. But it was really important to us to stay rooted in empiricism. It allowed us to establish Jack as an empiricist and Locke as a man of faith, and to have these characters debate the essence of what they were experiencing. Was it a mystical experience, or was it just a really, really weird place that has incredible physical anomalies?

Carroll: It’s like purposefulness versus randomness.

Lindelof: That’s right. It’s order versus chaos. But first it had to start as science versus faith, because Jack is a doctor and Locke is a guy who got up from his wheelchair and walked. Now the question has been boiled down to its essential root — is there a God or is there nothingness?

Carroll: Presumably, if it is order versus chaos or purpose versus randomness, there is no right answer. It’s not as if in the finale you’re going to say, “Yup, it was order.”

Cuse: I don’t think there’s a right answer.

Lindelof: But the show can’t have its cake and eat it, too. At the end of the day, if Jack and Locke were to sit down and say, “Well, we were kind of both right,” that would not be satisfying.

Cuse: There’s still going to be plenty of room for debate when the show is over. We are going to take a stab at providing a conclusion, one that we hope will be satisfying. The bigger questions, we recognize, are not answerable.

Lindelof: It’s like when you spend time with a 3-year-old, you quickly find out that one question just begets another — there’s a “why” in the wake of every “why” — and the only way to end the conversation is to say, “Oh look, a Chuck E. Cheese!” The show is doing its best to say, “Oh look, Chuck E. Cheese!” For example, we’ve now given the viewers as much as we’re willing to say about the numbers, and we’re moving on.

Cuse: I think there’s this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. But there is no unified field theory for Lost, nor do we think there should be. Philosophically we don’t buy into that. The great mysteries of life fundamentally can’t be addressed. We just have to tell a good story and let the chips fall where they may. We don’t know whether the resolution between the two timelines is going to make people say, “Oh, that’s cool” or “Oh, fuck those guys, they belly-flopped at the end.” But the fact that we’re nervous about it and that we’re actually attempting it — that is what we had to do. We had to try to make the dive.

Image: ABC

The Cargo cont.

1

Asthma inhaler

3

bottles of hydrogen peroxide

10

medications

2

Cartons of Bilson cigarettes

1

bag of heroin

1

Bottle of bug repellent

1

Pregnancy test

9

books

4

pens

5

notebooks/ diaries

Diapers

2

Pairs of sunglasses

15

Pairs of eyeglasses

1

coffin

27

Bottles of water

8

airline meals

1

Apollo Candy bar

7

sets of plastic utensils

1

Coffee pot

9

coffee cups

1

bag of Coffee

Tea

9

Knives

3

Ice chests

16

mini bottles of alcohol

1

bottle of MacCutcheon Scotch

1

750-ml bottle of Maker’s Mark bourbon

1

Green lantern comic book (en espanõl)

6

magazines

1

guitar

1

bass

1

Backgammon set

1

portable cd player

2

pairs of headphones

1

The Best of Phil Collins cassette

1

Tennis ball

1

Toy airplane

1

set of golf clubs

7

Children’s dolls

$8 million worth of diamonds

The Art of Devotion

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Image: ABC

Michael Giacchino

The Man Behind the Sound

Who can claim the most screen time on Lost? No, not Jack or Kate or Locke — it’s a player you never even see. For more than 100 episodes, composer Michael Giacchino has supplied about 35 minutes of music for each 43-minute episode.

It’s been a dream (and Emmy-winning) assignment for a guy who once made a living scoring Medal of Honor videogames. Lost creator J.J. Abrams loved Giacchino’s game music and hired him to add a frenetic, electronic tempo to his ABC series, Alias. So when it came time to choose a composer for Lost, Giacchino was first on the list. His assignment: Help the audience interpret the show’s mystifying action. Would Boone survive? Not if those mournful piano chords were any indication. And what was Smokey doing to Jacob’s gun-toting foot soldiers? Nothing good, according to that bombastic brass.

All was rendered clear (OK, clear-ish) thanks to the aural showmanship of the composer who also became Pixar’s music man, scoring The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and last year’s Up, which earned him an Oscar. Lost‘s twists and turns may be complex, but Giacchino’s process isn’t: “I just let the story tell me what to do,” he says. “I watch and react emotionally, then turn that reaction into music.” Cue the triumphal trumpet blast.— E.M.

The Real Fake Band

How creating Geronimo Jackson brought one staff writer’s fantasy to life.

If there’s any group of devotees more loyal and obsessed than Lost fans, it’s Deadheads. And long before Eddy Kitsis was hired as a writer for Lost, he dreamed of being the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia. So when he became a Hollywood scribe instead of a guitar-plucking warbler, he decided to create a fictional Grateful Dead-style band for his own amusement — and then became fixated on making the world believe it was real.

The result was Geronimo Jackson — named after Barry Hannah’s award-winning novel Geronimo Rex — a 1970s band that occasionally pops up on Lost, whether on a hitchhiker’s T-shirt in a Locke flashback (above) or blasting from a Dharma Initiative van on the island. Kitsis crafted the band’s initial “image” by borrowing heavily from the Dead’s Steal Your Face album art and vintage typefaces from Creem magazine. But having fictional followers on Lost wasn’t enough for Kitsis, and the writer soon finagled $20,000 from ABC execs to bring the bogus band to life. Childhood friend Craig Finn, lead singer for the Hold Steady, suggested he check out a San Diego-based indie quartet called the Donkeys. Kitsis liked what he heard and hired the group to rerecord its tune “Excelsior Lady” as a show-referencing track called “Dharma Lady.” The song, which aired for 11 seconds in a February 2009 episode, was then discreetly planted on iTunes.

“Dharma Lady” immediately gave the Donkeys — er, Geronimo Jackson — a loyal following among Lost viewers and gave Kitsis a taste of rock stardom by proxy. But true success came when Kitsis met one of his musical heroes, Dead bassist Phil Lesh, and learned he was a fan of the show. “How do you tell him, ‘You inspired me so much, I created a fake band after you!'” Kitsis says. If Lesh does tune in every week, there’s no need to tell him.— Erik Malinowski

The Web of Intrigue

Identifying the characters’ connections leading up to the fateful plane crash is essential to untangling Lost‘s plotlines. Here’s a map of key links, rendered by bioinformatics scientist Martin Krzywinski with the genome-mapping software Circos.— Holly Haynes

Type of Link

Click links below to view character connections.

All

Chance

Family

Romance

Occupational

Touched by Jacob

Undisclosed

Visit from Richard

Visit from The Wire‘s Lieutenant Daniels

Images: ABC

The Puzzling Science Project

When Oceanic flight 815 crashes, its survivors find intriguing remnants (polar bears!) of the Dharma Initiative, a 1970s-era research project with roots in Taoism. The group’s logo shows up on hatch covers and beer cans — even on a Rubik’s Cube on executive producer Carlton Cuse’s desk.

LISTEN: Previously On Lost

Some Lost lovers are more obsessive than others. Two musicians-turned-fans even managed to transform the series’ complicated plotlines into catchy pop songs. Check out Previously On Lost — the band.

The Fact-Checker

For its first season, the producers of Lost were flying blind. That’s right, the people running a show with interwoven narratives — backstories, future stories, alternate-reality stories, and stories that even a savant couldn’t keep track of — weren’t keeping track of all that stuff. Once it became clear that season one wouldn’t be Lost‘s last, executive producer Carlton Cuse realized he needed a continuity czar. His pick: Gregg Nations, a former Nash Bridges colleague. Nations had only one question: “How did you make it out of the first season alive?”

Nations set about documenting every detail of Lost‘s amorphous, time-shifting, mind-bending universe — Sawyer’s swindles, Kate’s hair colors and aliases, Shannon’s addresses — in sprawling Word documents. He became the go-to source for all prop, art, and script questions. “I tell the writers, you guys are writing that Kate has a rifle,” Nations says. “She doesn’t have a rifle; she has a handgun.” If Jack gets punched in the face during a fight, Nations makes sure that makeup artists show the bruise healing realistically. Where is Jack’s wound? How many days has it been since the fight? Plus, “the island makes you heal faster,” he says. “So factor that in, too.”

But fight scenes are nothing compared with flight scenes. The plane, Nations says, “is the bane of my existence.” The task of keeping, say, row numbers straight in a hectic production on a cramped set makes his stomach turn, especially as they’ve filmed essentially the same scene over multiple seasons. His solution: Scrub the plane of identifying details. Nations convinced the production crew that the passengers’ general placement (midsection versus tail) and proximity (Rose and Jack speak on the plane) is what matters most. “Oh, my God, that stupid plane,” Nations says. “Perhaps I was naive when I thought, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to be that difficult.'” — Rachel Swaby

Image: ABC

The Hidden Clues

Lost demands constant focus: Blink and you’ll miss a clue to the big WTF. Fans have cracked the Easter eggs — or have they? Here are four of our favorite secret messages and four that might be nothing at all. (Two more might be concealed in this feature.)— Angela Watercutter

4 Easter Eggs We Loved

4 (Probable) Red Herrings

Hurley dreams of raiding the stash in the hatch. As he takes a swig of milk, we see Walt’s missing-person photo on the carton, though Hurley doesn’t know yet that the boy has been kidnapped.

Locke is bitten by his father in a fight. When he examines the wound, viewers said, they saw the name Alex on his arm. More likely: random arm-hair pattern.

The funeral parlor handling Locke’s corpse is named Hoffs/Drawlar, an anagram for “flash forward” — and a clue to the imminent plot shift.

Fans swore they spotted a faint Dharma Initiative logo emblazoned on the wreckage of Oceanic 815. Just a trick of the light.

The trippy film Karl is forced to watch in Room 23 is teaser heaven. The highlight? Played backward, the dialog says, “Only fools are enslaved by time and space” — referencing the time travel yet to come.

Before season six began, eagle-eyed frequent flyers noticed that Oceanic Airlines flights from Sydney to LA were available on the travel site Kayak.com. Well played, Kayak.

Richard Alpert visits a young John Locke to give him a test. Check out little Locke’s drawing of the smoke monster he will one day (sort of) become.

As Kate enters a courtroom in a flashback scene, a man yells … something. Played backward, it sounds like “We hate you!” Or not. Nothing to hear here.

Keeper of the Fans’ Holy Writ

Lostpedia is a sprawling font of all things Lost.

By day, Kevin Croy is a 33-year-old data center strategist for Expedia in Bellevue, Washington. By night (and in his other free time), he is the guardian of Lostpedia — the sprawling online compendium that millions of devotees consult to seek knowledge and share their Lost-fu. Wired asked Croy about being the keeper of the unofficial canon and what it means to be a fan in the age of Internet-enabled obsession. — Angela Watercutter

Wired: Did Lostpedia change the relationship between the show’s followers and its creators?

Kevin Croy: Definitely. I think the TV networks have realized how important these communities are to the success of their shows. I don’t have proof, but I’m fairly certain the writers and producers of Lost use Lostpedia as a way to instantly gauge audience reaction and comprehension.

Wired: Is it hard to keep a wiki like this from getting out of control?

Croy: The community does a great job keeping it free of spoilers, spam, and vandalism. My job is to make sure the sandbox is big enough and that there’s enough sand for everyone. The community’s job is to build castles and play together nicely.

Wired: What are your readers’ biggest questions?

Croy: There’s an article on Lostpedia that’s got a list of the unsolved mysteries. There are 26 right now. I still really want to know what the deal is with the smoke monster.

Wired: Are the show runners aware of the site?

Croy: Continuity czar Gregg Nations emailed me once and said there was a mistake in the title of one of the upcoming episodes. I asked him if he would like to get drinks one of these days, and he said, “Yeah, absolutely.” A part of me wants to run down there and have some beers with these guys and ask them questions. But I know they wouldn’t say anything anyway.

Wired: Any predictions on how Lost will end?

Croy: I don’t know. But I think it would be great if the people on the island really did save the planet from catastrophe. I would like there to be a reason all this stuff is happening.

Wired: Once the show ends, what happens to the fans?

Croy: I’ll be around as long as they’re around. One of the things I’d be interested in seeing is whether Lost becomes like Star Trek and spawns a community that brings in new disciples. And maybe there could be a Lost Con or a Lostpedia Con. I actually registered Lostpediacon.com.

kayak.com; all other images ABC

Full Interview: The Island Paradox

How will the series end? What do the numbers mean? And what’s the deal with Libby? Lost executive producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof aren’t telling. They were, however, happy to sit down with theoretical physicist (and Lost fan) Sean Carroll, author of From Eternity to Here, to talk time travel and the universe — and to reveal the link between Lost and Chuck E. Cheese.

Wired: I turned on the first episode of Lost thinking, OK, there’s an island, a plane crash, some pretty people, and J.J. Abrams. Six years later I’m addicted to a full-blown science fiction show. How the hell did that happen?

Carlton Cuse: At the beginning the secret was that the show didn’t announce itself as a genre show, so it could be about the characters. The audience got invested in the characters first and the mythology second. We were criticized for not having the characters talk about the mythology, and we were like, “That’s right, that’s our dirty little secret.” By not having the audience talk about the mythology, then people are engaged in: “Is Kate going to end up with Sawyer?” and “I’m really compelled by the complexities of Benjamin Linus.” Those are the things we wanted the audience to obsess about, not whether the Valenzetti equation had any relevance to the functioning of the island’s magical time travel properties.

Sean Carroll: The science fiction allowed you to raise the stakes gradually over a period of time. It would have been hard to have a six-year show about people marooned on an island without science fiction elements.

Damon Lindelof: Impossible.

Cuse: It would have been a very boring show in our estimation.

Carroll: How much of what we’re learning now in season six was figured out in the first season, versus, say, a month ago?

Lindelof: There’s no empirical answer to that question. The way we got through the first season was, if we introduced a mystery, like a polar bear running through the jungle, or a hatch that was discovered in the ground, we had to know what the resolution of that specific mystery was. And in the episode-to-episode writing of the show there’s an enormous amount of discovery. I think one of the most profound lessons I’ve learned over time as a show runner is that the more you listen to the show, the better your show. We watched our characters interact, and that would influence how we put them together.

Cuse: It probably bears some similarity to your work in physics, where you have a hypothesis and you start testing it.

Carroll: It’s one thing to have a hypothesis and even figure out what the predictions of that theory are, but then it’s going to be shaped by what you observe in the universe.

Lindelof: We have to have the answers to the mysteries so that there is something to work towards, but what we don’t have are the stories. J.K. Rowling can sit down and say, here’s how Harry Potter’s parents were killed, and here’s who killed them, but how am I going to reveal that information to the audience in the most emotionally impactful way? So we know what we want to do, but we have very little idea of how and when we’re going to do it.

Carroll: In physics there’s an explanation of how the past affects things in the future, in terms of entropy and thermodynamics. But part of the fun in narrative is you don’t need to go from the present to the future — you can go back and forth. You’ve used every narrative direction to go in — flashback, flash forward, flash sideways. How did you conceptualize cause and effect, questions of destiny and free will, and the narrative impact of using real time travel as opposed to just flashbacks?

Cuse: We really wanted to tell some more stories about the history of the island. We became more and more fascinated with the Dharma Initiative, and the audience seemed really engaged by it. And we thought, how do we tell those stories? We certainly don’t want to go back and just meet a bunch of new characters in the Dharma Initiative. We thought the best way to tell that story was to put our characters into that world. So the narrative device is selected by figuring out, what is the best way to tell this story we want to tell? Along with that, it felt like there’s this incredible theme that we want to explore on the show, the question of destiny versus free will. And it felt like this was this tremendous opportunity to use literal time travel both as an effective narrative tool and also dig into this thematic construct, which as you get to the end of the show feels more and more relevant.

Carroll: You now have two timelines: life after the hydrogen bomb is detonated and life as if the plane had never crashed. Will season six end up making sense of how these two timelines fit together?

Lindelof: In previous seasons it was very clear that this happened before, and this happened after. Now you watch, and you go, “I don’t know when this happened, because things are different.” It’s not just what would have happened if the plane landed; now Jack has a son and there are these changes. The audience is saying, “I hope they explain the relationship between these two stories,” and that, to us, is the only answer we owe. Because at this point, the characters are not aware that there’s any timeline other than the one they are in. But if they were to become aware of the parallel worlds, what might they do about it? That becomes a fundamental question.

Carroll: At times you’ve made nods to science-y-sounding concepts —wormholes, the Casimir effect. How are these scientific concepts useful to you?

Cuse: It’s inspirational. We try to connect the show with a plausible sense of scientific concepts, recognizing that of course we’re ultimately telling a fictional narrative that is implausible. It has to make some kind of elemental scientific sense to us. It helps us as storytellers to say, OK, a massive amount of electromagnetism could create a wormhole that could allow someone to travel from the island, but that wormhole is unstable and sometimes they might pop up in Tunisia and it’s 10 months earlier than they thought it was. Those kind of things help us.

Carroll: I always say that without physics, there’s no drama. Because there are rules. I think scientists don’t always understand that in a science fiction context the rules may not be the rules of our world, but there are still rules.

Cuse: As we draw into the final season, the mystical quotient rises. But it was really important to us to stay rooted in empiricism. It allowed us to establish Jack as an empiricist and Locke as a man of faith, and to have these characters debate the essence of what they were experiencing. Was it a mystical experience, or was it just a really, really weird place that has incredible physical anomalies?

Wired: Do you still see that as the central issue, man of faith versus man of science?

Lindelof: The paradigm has shifted from that to, were we brought here for a very specific reason, and what is that reason? Locke is now the voice of a very large subset of the audience who believes that when Lost is all said and done, we will have wasted six years of our lives, that we were making it up as we went along, and that there’s really no purpose. And Jack is now saying, “the only thing I have left to cling to is that there’s got to be something really cool that’s going to happen, because I have really, really fucking suffered.”

Carroll: It’s like purposefulness versus randomness.

Lindelof:. That’s right. It’s order versus chaos, which is what it always was. But first it had to start as science versus faith, because Jack is a doctor and Locke is a guy who got up from his wheelchair and walked. Now the question has been boiled down to its essential root—is there a God or is there nothingness?

Carroll: Presumably, if it is order versus chaos or purpose versus randomness, there is no right answer. It’s not as if in the finale you’re going to say, “Yup, it was order.”

Cuse: I don’t think there’s a right answer.

Lindelof: But the show can’t have its cake and eat it, too. At the end of the day, if Locke and Jack were to sit down and say, “Well, we were kind of both right,” that would not be satisfying. It has to come down one way or another.

Cuse: But there’s still going to be plenty of room for debate when the show is over. We are going to take a stab at providing a conclusion, and one that we hope will be satisfying on a character level. The bigger questions, we recognize, are not answerable. We feel that demystifying some of the things we do on Lost is like the magician showing you how the trick is done, and we don’t want to do that.

Carroll: Is there a worry that there exists questions for which any possible answer is not as interesting as the question would be before you knew the answer?

Lindelof: Absolutely. I assume that as a physicist, you say, “Force equals mass times acceleration,” and you can explain why. But when you spend time with a 3-year-old, you quickly find out that one question just begets another—there’s a “why” in the wake of every “why”—and the only way to end the conversation is to say, “Oh look, a Chuck E. Cheese!” The show is doing its best to say, “Oh look, Chuck E. Cheese!” For example, we’ve now given the viewers as much as we’re willing to say about the numbers, and we’re moving on. The characters are going to ask “What is the island”, and “Why are we here”, but more importantly, “How is it relevant to me.” They’re not sitting around in smoking jackets talking about the theoretical notions that we are, as audience members.

Cuse: I think there’s this essential human desire to have a unified field theory. Everyone is like, “I want to unlock the single secret to Lost.” There isn’t any one secret. There is not a unified field theory for Lost, nor do we think there should be, because philosophically we don’t buy into that as a conceit.

Lindelof: As much confidence as we have in the story we’re telling, we are also comfortable saying, “But what do we know?” This is our best version of the story of Lost, and it’s the definitive one. The worst thing we could ever do is not end it, or go with some bullshitty ending like a snowglobe or a cut to black. That was genius on The Sopranos, but The Sopranos isn’t a mystery show. For us, we owe our best version of a resolution here.

Cuse: These heady questions are ultimately unanswerable, and we know the audience is hoping that those things are going to be answered. The great mysteries of life fundamentally can’t be addressed. We just have to tell a good story and let the chips fall where they may. We don’t know whether the resolution between the two timelines is going to make people say, “Oh, that’s cool” or “Oh, fuck those guys, they belly-flopped at the end.” But the fact that we’re nervous about it and that we’re actually attempting it—that is what we had to do. We had to try to make the dive.